This,perhaps the only book very cogently weaves disperate/contadicting

ideas into wholistic/dynamic hinduism;It is an informative gem and a succur to emergent open minded indians including many muslims, who respect but

dont really understand,their ancester’s creed.The book however ignores ideas/icons brought by mesopotamian farmers;these are now accepted as “seedlings”of indian system by many e.g Thomas McEvelley,Stephanie Dalley etc;Dr Doniger misses the potential role of Elamitic persians ,dravidian’s linguitic cousins as the first or joint authors of Vedas which perhaps got rendered later on in sanskrit, a hybrid rooted in the mideast which is the source of many words i.e SIVA(god in hittite),BALAJI from wellknown biblical Baal(mean:lord/exalted),indra,Allah,rab etc;famous God

words.She assignes the horse training manual to hittite language wrongly;it is Hurrian-mittanni,a turkish/dravidian type-agglutinating language.Linguistic science at this time is focussed on out of Africa and mideast farmers as the source of much in india/europe and discards biblical Noah and his SEMITIC/Aryan-IE race/family(19th cent. model).My own recent work”urdu/hindi an artificial divide–mesopotamian roots”,based on evolution reveals a shared origin of hinduism and Abrahamism from sumero-babilonia with later regional growth.DR Doniger’s book will mostly be distastefull to Indo-centric creationists,as much as out of africa/evolution is to biblical defenders/racists.It was indeed a priviledge to comment on “the leading authority” on hinduism,a dynamic

religion ,practiced but not well understood even by many hindus;THe latter

being true with all religions in general;Faithfulls cannot be most objectiv on their own faith.Thanks to Dr Doniger that we do have some grip on hinduism a dynamic idealogy of my indian ancesters.Obviously by excluding the indian,s origin from africa,she has retained 19th cent model perhaps to make peace with fundamentalist’s anger.A complete history

of hinduism should include the origin of Indians from Africa and dispersal of hinduism’s ideas/indian languages by mideast farmers along with agricultural tecnology;

Rating: 4 / 5

I highly recommend this book in such a complicated theme, and hopefully wait for the author’s next text, which I hope is on Buddhism. Muchas gracias.
Rating: 4 / 5

This is a most fascinating work on the question of Hinduism, despite a number of problems which all books on this subject seem to inherit. One problem with a book solely on Hinduism lies in the neglect of the question of Buddhism and Jainism, and the phenomenon of the Axial Age in which their resurgent action appears. Focusing only on the Hindu stream can be misleading if it omits those parallel histories. The history of Indian religion, in one narrative, is about the symmetric parallel worlds of emerging Hinduism, an upstart Aryan concotion later than the primordial tradition, and Buddhism, the grandchild of the ancient Jainism that is resurgent in the Axial period.

Beyond the endless fascinating detail lies the basic question of the status of Hinduism itself. The current debates over the Aryan migration thesis have made most authors of histories of Hinduism paranoid, and it can help to get one’s bearings with older histories from a generation ago, viz. Alain Danielou’s A Brief History Of History, which shows, from a convert’s point of view, a critique of Hinduism that is implicit in the sense of exposing its artificial character, as a creation of the Aryan invaders/immigrants that distorted the prior tradition and imposed the law of caste on the earlier primordial tradition which must surely have been Dravidian. Perhaps the key to Hinduism is to see the ancient traditon that sources before the Aryan entry era. It is not western bias to see the subject that way, and it is important to see that the phantom of Hinduism is a hybrid that is not hard to dismantle and understand given the basic keys.

There is no end of reading histories of Hinduism; despite its limits this one should join the list.
Rating: 5 / 5